While the federal government expanded funding for school breakfast and lunch programs and other food assistance programs in the spring of 2020, there was no federal mandate that the programs continue, or guidance for carrying them out. Thus, local governments devised their own plans to provide emergency food services to low-income families, to varying degrees of effectiveness. The researchers evaluated how emergency feeding programs, including SNAP, food banks and schools, distributed food during the pandemic; who used these services; the costs of these services; the food provided and its dietary quality. The research team conducted interviews and focus groups with emergency food service providers in five cities—the Albany, New York Capitol Region; Austin, Texas; Cleveland, Ohio; Denver, Colorado and Flint, Michigan—to understand how decisions by schools, governments and other emergency food service providers impacted access to food.
The researchers discovered that the success of local responses to low-income food insecurity depended on three factors:
- Cross-sector collaboration: Cities with higher cross-sector participation among stakeholders were able to reach more families with nutrition and food needs. In Denver, for example, city and county officials had pre-pandemic working relationships in place with food rescue organizations to support food security efforts. Cities with low collaboration had more difficulties, such as Flint, where distrust in local authorities, a result of the ongoing water crisis, remains high.
- Adaptable supply chains: Cities with adaptable supply chains also had more success at feeding their vulnerable populations. Flint and Cleveland experienced supply chain problems that limited the amount of food available to smaller food banks with less purchasing power. These issues required sourcing food from farther distances. In Denver, many of the smaller food banks closed at the beginning of the pandemic and food banks were able to more efficiently handle increased demand. Additionally, many feeding programs experienced a drop in volunteers, making it harder to deliver food to those in need. Albany and Cleveland overcame this problem with distribution assistance from the National Guard.
- Addressing gaps in service to increased risk populations: As COVID-19 disproportionately affects communities that are already underserved, it is essential to identify and address gaps in service to increased risk populations. As part of their emergency response plans, Austin and Denver have prioritized services to populations facing food insecurity. In Austin, the Office of Sustainability mapped emergency food resources and distribution sites and are identifying communities where food needs have increased since the start of the pandemic. Denver is developing a food security plan that will be incorporated into a broader socially equitable pandemic recovery plan.
“Our five research teams were already involved in mapping and modeling our urban food systems when the pandemic hit,” said the report’s corresponding author Dr. Becca Jablonski of Colorado State University. “This previous work, coupled with strong relationships with key food system stakeholders in each of our cities, put us in a position to act quickly to document changes within the emergency food service system due to COVID-19 and to begin to describe the effectiveness of interventions taken to respond to school closures. We hope that this research is useful in considering the tradeoffs associated with different types of responses as well and how to better prepare for future crises.”
The researchers conclude that while different regional and local approaches to providing food security to low-income families and children is necessary to respond to specific contexts, more robust guidance from the federal government may improve the effectiveness of the responses.
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Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research
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